PARIS (Parliament Politics Magazine) – The 2022 French presidential election will reach its conclusion in just one week. The latest polls still give Emmanuel Macron the lead ahead of Marine Le Pen. The outgoing president has picked up a few points in the poll results.
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- While the 2nd round of the presidential election will take place in 6 days from now, the Macron – Le Pen duel is in the process of crystallising and many things can still happen before and after the televised debate between the two rounds set for Wednesday evening.
- The results of the latest polls on this 2022 presidential election all give Emmanuel Macron the winner in the second round on Sunday April 24, in a range of 53 to 55.5% against 44.5 to 47% for Marine Le Pen. The president-candidate is up slightly in the latest polls published since Friday, but the gap with the RN candidate remains within the margin of error. Any misstep will now be a high price to pay and the mobilisation of the anti-Macron electorate remains majorly unknown.
Following are the events from today.
1.4 million euros were collected by Valérie Pécresse after her appeal for donations
Monday April 15, 2022, the day after the first round of the 2022 presidential election, Valérie Pécresse, having not obtained the 5% necessary to reimburse her campaign, had launched an appeal for donations, having gone into debt of five million euros. According to the information from BFMTV, the Republican candidate would have collected 1.4 million euros in one week.
Marine Le Pen assures that she is different from her father
“I want to tell you that there are a thousand differences between him and me. I don’t have the same age, we didn’t have the same background, we didn’t experience the same things, he’s a man, I’m a woman. Besides, when I tell you we don’t have the same background, it’s so in reality, he was the president of a movement which was a movement, first of protest and then an opposition movement. I was for ten years the president of a government movement.” The National Rally candidate added
Marine Le Pen advocates a calm debate between the two rounds
Traveling to Calvados, Marine Le Pen pleaded for a calm debate, project against project: “What I want is for the debate to take place calmly. Let it be a confrontation of ideas. I don’t have to have the same ideas at all as Emmanuel Macron, we don’t have the same vision of society, we don’t have the same vision of the country, nor the same vision of what the economy should be, to whom it should be directed.” In addition, the candidate fears that the confrontation will turn into a rat race: “I hope it will not be what I have been hearing for a week, that is to say a succession of invectives fake news, excesses as I heard again this morning from Mr. Attal.
According to Louis Alliot, Emmanuel Macron is the “man of the system”
Questioned by France Inter this Monday, April 18, Louis Alliot affirmed that Emmanuel Macron is a man of the system, as shown by the various platforms of personalities calling to vote for the outgoing president: “I think that these are platforms that can mobilise those who still doubted that Macron is the man of the system. We see it in each election. If I take my own case, I had a republican front against me. Artists had mobilised, the sports world, associations. Then, in the end, the people decide.”
Emmanuel Macron wants to reform and “modernise our institutional functioning”
Emmanuel Macron repeated his desire to modernise the institutional functioning, at France Culture: “I think that we must modernise both our Constitution, and our institutional functioning. You cannot go before the French people if your project was not first approved by the National Assembly and the Senate in a compliant way. So what I am committing to is to set up a cross-party commission, along with political forces that are present in the first round of the presidential election and who would not necessarily be represented in the Assembly and the Senate, which is the case with the National Rally today, and that this commission can propose a project that we can advance.” The outgoing president also insisted on defending the proportional system: ” It is clear that a consensus is emerging to say that we need an Assembly that better represents political sensitivities, therefore more proportional. Personally, I’m ready to go all out. We need to have ways and means so that the executive is not blocked. I don’t want to redo the Fourth or Third Republic, whose limits we have seen. It was weaker than the Ve. So we have to have a strong executive alongside a strong parliament.”
Marine Le Pen’s desire to reform the Constitution is unconstitutional for Emmanuel Macron
Emmanuel Macron slammed the fact of resorting to the referendum route for Marine Le Pen’s constitutional reform project: “I am in favour of reforming the Constitution in accordance with the rules of the Constitution. Which seems to me precisely to be the very definition of belonging to the republican party. Where Madame Le Pen, in her project, proposes a reform of the Constitution by referendum, this which is not in accordance with the Constitution, and that is a problem. Others do it, in other countries. It is done very well in Hungary and it allows you to change a regime by hand.” Moreover, the outgoing president considers that a referendum on the death penalty would be unconstitutional in the same way: “In the same way, when she says she is ready to submit a referendum to reverse the death penalty, that is not in conformity with the Constitution. In that, it is a deep regression on what is an achievement of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.
